Artisan's Week

Artisan's Week

We are nestled here between mountains. Our valley nestled like a bowl, a vessel, between mountains. The vessel of our valley is full of goodness, clean air and water, fertile earth, all the growing things, all the living beings that feed from the growing things. Deeper down beneath us there nestles the clay and minerals and oxides and further down still, the fire that lives inside our precious Earth. Above us during the day there shines the fire of our life-giving sun and at night the glow of our moon, the mysterious twinkle of the stars. The rain gently falling, or fervently falling, filling the river that flows past us, carrying our stories to the sea. Mists rise, as springtime birds suckle nectar from the rich blooms that abound. All these elements coalesce around us, pulling forth the seed, furling forth the plants, the leaf, stem, pod, flower, that feed the animals, that give the fibre, that feed and nourish the human, that make the medicines to tend the ailments of body, that craft the paper and dye the yarn, that become the wood that is crafted into precious objects of utility and beauty, the wood that fuels the forge, that feeds the fire, that sinters the clay, the clay dug from the deep, the metal refined by the hand from the minerals deep beneath. Earth made anew, transformed by the maker.

This week we have been blessed to journey with our elders of craft and amidst all the making there were threads of story, weaving through the loom. The work making meaning in the heart and restoring wholeness to the spirit. We spoke of the colour of stars and the colour of flames, the mythological underpinnings of the origins of Iron, it’s great gift to life and also our need to be vigilant to it’s potential for harm. We sensed the imperative of a deepening responsibility, to offer ballast to the technologies we grow in our evolving capacity to craft complexity from raw matter. Our need for greatest care and attention, and allowing the thing between our hands to matter enormously for a moment, even in the risk of its breaking. We spoke of the moving from what is known, through to what is imagined but feared, to the new place of knowing and integrating embodied wisdom, the work of our hands leading the way, the limitations of the material providing the framework, the bounds of our imaginations offering the scope. 

I could feel such goodness in these people, young and old. How we have been crafted ourselves by place and by earth and the hard work of the hands, to become humans who bare gifts for our tribe, humble gifts of understanding and transmutation, of purpose and nourishment, of presence and patience and perseverance. The wood workers bending together with gentle humour as they work, coaxing the material towards a new wholeness, a new goodness in the shape of a stool. Heads bowed together at the loom, reimagining the warp and the weft of our patterning. The synchronised striking of hammer to copper & iron, the music made by this shared making. This music serenading the fierce concentration required in finding centre, within the malleable clay at the potters wheel. The quiet toil of the binding of books, creating worlds in which future words and images will unfurl our future. The nourishing sustenance of food, alchemised to please and satiate the taste buds, the eyes, the belly, the wholeness of being.

Materials coalesce in cross pollinations of modality. Copper hammered to form vessel, copper in the rich green of the glaze that seals the rough rawness of clay, refining. Alumina as mordant to dye red cabbage yarn, Alumina fusing with Silica to  sinter the clay that it may hold water and bear food, foods rich in minerals, drawn from the earth by water through roots. The pots smouldering in sawdust, wood shavings, from wood sculpted, drawn, whittled, carved. Wood burnt to hone charcoal for the fierce heat that will melt the metal, fruits grown from wood harvested for feasting, artfully prepared and tastefully seasoned, paper crafted from wood, made vessel for meaning, wood grown from Earth. Metal extracted from Earth, Iron in the fire in the forge, Iron in the clay, pinky-red between the potters hands, iron in the pigments that paint the leaf and blossom that cover the books that tell the stories of our makings, Iron as mordant for dying yarn, the plantain rich in Iron to nourish our blood. Metal as the Potters wheel, wood as the spinners wheel, wooden and metal tools, needle, hammer, tong, axe, pan, knife, block, cup. Our hands as the tool of Earth, the living tool transmuting itself into ever more various forms.

The materials of the earth offer themselves up and are braided together by our song of creation. The wood of the wheel that spins the wool, the metal of the shears forged in fire, that harvest the fleece of sheep, the sheep grown fat from spring grasses and weeds grown of earth, as we are nourished by her gentle harvest. Earth that is dug and  turns the bowl to hold the food that feeds the folk. Earth that refined becomes the Iron that shears the sheep.  It cycles around, again and again, this great spiralling reciprocity, this noble generative force of our living. This earth that feeds us in every way, that nourishes us and offers us this bountiful array of ways in which we may ennoble ourselves with hand and heart, ensouling matter. 

Within this lies the alchemizing ingredients of disappointment and heartbreak. The broken pot, the burnt finger, the splintered wood, the arduous grappling with the sometimes unfathomable distance that lies between the imagined outcome and the thwarted reality. But I see the goodness that this questing has grown in us, has forged in us as makers. The way these materials have shaped us and made us a worthy instrument of this living celebration of life, that we may be bent by an unseen hand to transform and transmute raw matter, into useful tool with which to purposefully toil, into structures, fragrant with beeswax and linseed oil, that offer comfort and shelter for our weary bones, into humble vessels with which to contain our nourishment and quenching, into cloth with which to cover and warm and adorn the vulnerability of our bodies, the food that feeds both body and soul, the balms and tinctures that heal and cure when care is called for, the paper and tomes that carry the words of praise, the accumulated wisdoms of this grand adventure that is life upon this land. That is life within this bowl, this vessel of a valley encircled by mountains. 

We have laboured long and hard and strong at this work. We have made beauty and purpose. We have been humbled by our limitations of capacity and material, we have been wearied in the most satisfying of ways. We have been forged in the fire, shaped at the wheel, woven on the loom, whittled by the maker, hammer, shuttle, bowl, knife, tong, needle, drill, wheel, anvil, spoon, spindle, blade, flame, air, water, earth, ether.

  Images and Text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022

When Grief Grows Roots

When the Ungreived for Past Beseiges The Now

When we have been parentified, emotionally or energetically from a very young age, caring and attuning and being of service can come to feel like our super power. Good girl, they praise us and we know what is being asked. It becomes entwined with our self-perception, entangled in our identity in ways that we may never fully understand or disentangle. The self has only ever known how to accomodate and perpetuate cycles of co-dependence and sacrifice. Sometimes before our sense of seperate self has had a chance to emerge from the enmeshed dyadic union of infancy, we are entrained to hold space, to surrogate, to carry for other. Some of us are still trying to engender a sense of self-as-seperate-to-other well into the fullness of our adult lives.

Then the time may come when we must grapple with the shadows of this archetypal compulsion to care, that has entangled in its roots our very quest to survive, our imperative to adapt in order to receive the life giving thread that would hold us to life, that would allow our soul to have a centre through which to live, a purpose in which to coalesce. The way we have learnt to care has been formed in the urgent imperative of survival, as understood by a very helpless and immature psyche and at it’s heart this impulse is a self protective force. In a sense our care becomes the shield with which we defend ourselves against unbearable rupture, our care becomes the weapon with which we assure our life-or-death dependence on relationship.

I am coming to understand that this way of contractual giving, this captive way of loving, can have a weaponisation encoded in it’s heart. As we grow and form adult intimate relationships, this adaptive way of relating is not always received by others as love, as care. It might in truth be more about control. Relationships may die in it’s wake, or perpetuate in stagnation. It can be a life long pattern of relating that holds us entrapped within the isolating defences of our original abandonment. Self perpetuating cycles of rejection and betrayal, because in spite of all our attending, we are unable to foster the true intimacy we long for. All our caring and centring of other does not equate to the reciprocal exchange of energy which we deeply hunger for. All our sacrifice does not bring us closer to the unconditional acceptance that we crave from other. Rather it pushes love further away and leaves us perpetually triggered, by the original trauma of unmet need and insecure attachment.

We may have a deep instinct for love, yet the time of such selfless care has missed its generative activation, it’s origin most fittingly placed in that oxytocin drenched, immersive field of the newly born mother and babe, intoxicating love pouring through in a one directional imperative to care and attend at the alter of this heaven lit dyad, with the otherworldly visitor at the breast. When this primal alter of motherhood is supported and held as the sacred threshold that it is, we learn unequivocally what it is to be loved and to have our needs met unapologetically by other, the nascent narcissism of our own helplessness instilling a deep intuitive knowing of safety and connection and merging, as well as eventually, boundary and cohesive selfhood, healthy separateness.

When this paradisiacal coalescence of love is absent however, or hindered, or made conditional, at any stage along the journey from infancy to maturity, we must make something happen in it’s place, we intelligently find or craft or create something that feels near enough, close enough to love. A subversion of the natural order, in the absence of loving capacity, we take complicit responsibility for the default, in ways subtle or overt, we become carer to the care-giver. We form belief systems about how safe a thing love is, how surrendered we should be in the receiving of it or how deeply we must protect ourselves from it. We form beliefs around what it means about us, about who we are, our value and worth, when love is showered in abundance, or when it is weaponised, absent or made dependant upon particular ways of relating and behaving. We grow our personality, our identity, our careers, our family structures around the ways we either heartfully received or desperately protected ourselves from this primary experience of love or it’s absence, depending on its capacity or lack as it moved towards us, depending on its purity or toxicity, it’s availability or it’s entanglement in the ancestral weave of inter-generational trauma. We raise our children from inside these beliefs, from within these adaptive survival strategies, these self protective shields from the unbearable affects of our own infancies, as we in turn were raised.

This subconscious imperative to habitually attend to the need of others is often seeded in the excruciating paralysis of a chronic freeze response or the ingratiating tyranny of a fawn response, the reactivity of a chronically over-burdened and under nourished nervous system. However beneath the placid facade of this placatory, pleasing, accomodating, self-sacrificing conditioning, there may often lurk profound abyss’s of grief and despair, torrential uprisings of rage, hatred, disgust. Whilst these are a natural and understandable response to the reality of one’s less than ideal circumstance of the bereft absence, the terrifying transgression.These feelings, we learnt early were not acceptable, and we may also cultivate substrata’s of shame and humiliation, that may thrive in the underworld of our experience, when we are not relationally titrated and co-regulated by a kind and loving enough other. When this rage and grief is split off from our conscious awareness, it becomes the toxic undercurrent of our loving, the shadow of our relating to other and self, often sabotaging our equilibrium with it’s volatile surfacing, when the pressure becomes too great, damaging our relationships and compromising our own sense of integrity and cohesive self awareness.

And so the day may come when we realise that what we thought was our super power, our gift to the world, the thing we were groomed for, trained in, indoctrinated to perpetuate; our deep capacity to relate and attune and to connect and to serve, has all along been perpetuating the primal injury of our own incapacity to receive, a way of protecting ourselves from true intimacy and connection, love and unity, because at the time when we were born into the field of love, raised in the innate expectation of care, we came to understand it as a dangerous thing, subtly or overt. A dangerous thing because of what was there that was not love, that may have been violent or cruel, the inflicting of pain, the transgressions, the crimes of commission. Or perhaps a dangerous thing because of what was supposed to come towards us that did not come, the absence, the lack, the invisibility, the diminishment, the crimes of omission.

In order to survive, one may have been asked to deny themselves a full spectrum of emotional expression. The dark emotions are relegated to the shadow lands of the inexpressible, our bodies may become uninhabitable, the imaginal and dissociative realms a tender respite, addictive behaviours a blessed relief from the fraught tension of holding the forbidden libidinal and enlivening energies at bay. Forever abiding the unconscious imperative of suppression of one’s own true self- emergence. Denying the internal impulse to awaken, we abide the entrained loyalty to the oppressor of our actualisation, the internalised abuser. The poignant longings for our own fruitful becoming, perpetually sabotaged and submerged by the overarching necessitation of our own subjugation.

When we come to understand that our isolation and disconnection is a result of our own instinctive and intrinsic defence against connection, even when our entire identity has been shaped by the imperative to attend to other, there is a deep reckoning that must be contended with. A retraction of the propensity to blame the Others in our lives for the long and repeating tales of lack and abandonment and disappointment and betrayal. Until we can come to bear the full weight of our part in this story, we will never receive what we most deeply long for. The grief of knowing that after a life of caring in order to be cared for, the debt will never be repaid, the gifting never returned, the care will never be reciprocated, in those relationships with which we have grappled in the shadows, not in the way that we would have wanted it, from that terrified child’s adaptive perception of what love might look like, this perception often forged in its absence. That the other that you love will never be able to be nourished by that version of care, that desperate, extractive seeking of safety and relational security, the daemonic imperative to survive by bonding with those who hold our lives in their ill-equipped hands. The only people who will ever be drawn to this way of loving are those with their own unrealised attachment wounds, their own perversely compatible defensive behaviours and attachment complexes.

It feels that there is a fundamental self responsibility that must be realised,

that while our primal wounding was beyond our control, that it was an abuse of power, or an expression of lack, undoubtedly honed by layer upon layer of inter- generational trauma, there is something about our psychic necessity to control the consequences of that wounding, that have perpetuated its constellation within our lives. Perhaps we have allowed ourselves to orbit too long around the imperative to not feel the seemingly unbearable affects that might truly have annihilated us as infants or small children, but which we now have the opportunity to forebear and transmute in our fierce capacity to experience and atone and embody the dissonances of our energetic, emotional, physical, psychological, somatic inheritances, of all that came to pass that was anything other than the intended birthright of attuned care and secure attachment.

It is one thing to realise the double-binded catch 22, the bewildering impossibility of this dynamic within the psyche, to awaken to the loss of life that has been left in its wake, and it is another to reeducate the heart, to retrain the brain, to regulate the nervous system to understand what true reciprocal relating might look like. This is the journey that I want to take, once the cold knot of my grief grows roots that sink deep enough through the bedrock to the earth’s ecstatic core and are nourished by the eternal fire that dwells there. Once the tongues of my rage have unfurled out as far as the furthest galaxies and been cooled there by the star light of a cosmic belonging and the remembering of a unity more eternal than blood. When I have turned towards my own self in the darkest of nights and in the deepest of pain and said yes, yes to love and risk and trust, yes to all of me, with the fierce heart of a mother’s claiming. Then I will begin to know what it is to root myself in the unequivocal force of my own worthiness of love, my own unconditional entitlement to care, that I might find, finally, an acceptance of my own body, an embracing of my own existence, a receptivity to support and prosperity, an actualisation of my own gentle power and co-creative capacity, an availability to love and connection that is founded in safety, in tender co-regulation and the reciprocity of deep and natural and self-actualised care.

Words and image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022

Women's Work

All around me I see women, other gentle humans as well, and many, many women, holding the world together in unseen and unpaid ways. Like the dark matter between particles, their love lubricates the space between sharp and jagged structures, offering flow and cushioning and agency, repair and insight to the disparate jarring of linear processes. Many of us cannot choose whether we do that unseen, unpaid work, because it is the very fabric of our being, it is the true work that we are on this Earth to do, to tend, to weave, to stitch and bind, to sooth and offer balm and remedy to the liminal spaces that our extractive, monetised systems fall short in accomodating. They fall short deliberately. The system cultivates our invisibility, it is dependant on our unconscious sublimation.

We live in a world that invalidates this kind of tending, keeps it in unconscious shadow, because it can’t afford to have us named and made visible. It can’t afford our labour and we would break the system if we all demanded our due. Can you imagine what would happen if we withdrew this labour? I am put in mind of Aristophane’s Lysistrata. How can we broker our true worth, illuminate our true value? How can we make the inequity conscious? What if our economic worth was made overt and it's true value remunerated? Would it in fact break capitalism? Could we end the war, of extractive brutality, to Earth and soul and human? Can we stop bodily absorbing the brunt of the disparity? It is making us sick and draining us of our true inheritance.

So much of that deep primal intelligence, instinctive emergence, co-creative capacity is held dormant and tethered in the unlived lives of exhausted women whose labour and soul is unsustainably farmed by the state. For some of us it takes everything to just survive inside a brutalising economy. If that energy were valued for what it is and given space to unfurl, if it were cultivated and honed and supported, if it unleashed itself on the world, unbridled, so much of what we know ourselves and the world to be would be irrevocably changed. Can we give back the responsibility of atonement to those structures that are complicit in our exploitation?

The system is dependant on us believing the story of our own worthlessness. The system shames us, so that it is free to harvest our gifts, that we cannot help but give, that we see as unimportant within a culture of patriarchal values. We have to invite each other to recognise the importance of what we are, of how we weave the world together with our words and touch and cohesive attending and generative repair. How do we centre the liminal? Shine light on the underneath and in-between? How do we withdraw our complicity and unequivocally claim the deep value and true worth and creative emergence of our own magnificent gifting to the great tapestry of life that holds us in its weave.

May our giving be rightfully reciprocated. May we be known for what we bring. May it be utilised to dismantle and transform the world. May it be used to rebuild and heal the world.

Words & Image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022

She Who Holds

 

Beautiful Anna

In so many ways Anna was everything that I am not. Where I feel slow and sluggish, Anna blazed forth with a fiery sword. Where I feel procrastination and reluctance, Anna knew what she wanted, and seized it with purpose and forthrightness. Where I am so deeply reticent and ambivalent about this whole incarnating on the earth in a human body thing, Anna was getting on with it, tending the micro biome, saving seeds, creating food forests. 

Despite these disparities of nature, my friendship with Anna was such a rich source of nourishment and balm to me.  Maybe my mistletoe liminality, was lent ballast from Anna’s deep roots, succour from her groundedness. 

Honest and real, and always grounded in the practically manifest, I was infinitely impressed with her capacity to wield a chainsaw, providing wood for both of our hearths, as the children and I, dogs underfoot, lugged and hauled the cut logs. I recall homemade sourdough pizza and kiwi fruit wine, music and laughter, the children’s raucous play, as I tucked in amongst the drying calendula in a corner of her kitchen and poured my heart out to the deep receptacle of her space holding. The steep climb up the flanks of Mount Little Joe, flaunting our locked-down 5km limit to celebrate Anna’s birthday. Flourless orange cake with a view, wildflowers abounding. Anna and Nelly climbed that mountain religiously and often for a while there. 

And just this summer gone, long days swimming in the river or the dam, escaping the heat, hot chips and gravy for dinner as the sun set and the air began to cool a little, the children’s capacity to stay in the wet never ceasing. Simple, easy, safe, nourishing beingness. Life with Anna. 

When I see her now, in my minds eye, it is a visage of joy that I see, with a dash of mischief and a lavish dose of compassionate warmth. It was infectious that joy of hers. My melancholic nature was always enlivened vicariously by her company. I became more when I was in her presence. I was made more radiant in her reflection. Life with Anna always felt so full of precious possibility.

Anna did not wait for permission, she threw herself at life. One day when I visited her after she had received her diagnosis and our conversation veered toward the possibility of her death, she spoke to me of how she wondered if she had lived so intensely precisely because a part of her had known it would not be for long. 

She birthed her beautiful children young and as she raised them she studied her passion of herbalism, building and growing gardens and also calling forth her extraordinary business of Community Supported Herbalism. Back to Earth Medicine not only bestowed us with her hand crafted remedies, but also taught us, her community, how to make those remedies ourselves. 

She was a grower, a maker, an educator, a healer, a guide, passionately reinforcing the need to consistently integrate and reliably practice the healing interface between human and plant world. Advocating for it’s capacity to heal and enliven us, as we cultivate a more embodied and actualised relationship with the bountiful Apothacary of nature’s gifts. Putting our roots down, growing the medicine that would heal the whole world. 

The natural world was Anna’s playground, gathering herbs and weeds from the wild, gleening apples from the roadside, foraging fungi in the forest. She was a true weedwife, her kitchen always full of fermenting vats and drying racks of herbs, plant matter strung from the rafters and concoctions, brews and potions in various recepticals adorning every surface. Nature’s abundance and medicinal potency permeated every corner of her life. Kombucha, sourdough, fruit wine, mead, herbal teas, tinctures, decoctions, ferments. She was alive with burgeoning becoming. 

And within all of this, so often close by her side, her precious children, equally wild and wise, cheeky and loving. Miraculous in their capacity to identify edible plants, to find and tend to animals of all kind, to build what was needed to create containment and structures through  which their wild life could perpetually bloom and multiply, chickens, quail, guinea pigs, goats. Always laughter, always fun, a little chaotic at times, but always life giving, bestowing all who walked in their wake with that vibrant glow of the grace of being alive. My daughter loved her time in the garden with Anna, she’d always come home green-stained and full of new wisdoms. 

We remember the time when Anna was constantly followed by the wild duckling named Fifi, that recognised her as mother for a time. There are many images of her snuggled in close to a chicken beloved, and her bond with Nelly, her rescue dog, was a match made in heaven. Anna’s vocal tone, rising to pitches of the most abiding Motherese, as she bestowed an endless stream of endearments, entoning praise and reassurance upon her beloved animal familiar. 

Anna loved deeply and passionately, with a generative tension between the impulse to fiercely follow her own independent path and direction, and her deep capacity for relational succour and transformative connection. The part of Anna that was a huntress of truth, often drove her down pathways that were not always the easy route, but which were steeped in deep enquiry and a wild instinct for integrity and sacred thresholds of becoming. 

In friendship Anna was voluminous, it seems now that she maybe had 101 best friends, each of us coveting our closeness as a precious gem, only to find there were so many of us that held her close in this way. Age was no barrier to her friendship’s, she loved us all, just as she found us. We, as the kith that mattered to her, were nourished so deeply at her hearth and privileged to offer her heart shelter and tending in her own turn. Because she was fierce in her living, but she was also courageous in her capacity for vulnerability. She was good at asking when she had need, she could rest into arms of comfort and weep in her hours of pain, just as she could set the world alight with the twinkle of mischief in her effervescent laughter. She effortlessly called in such profoundly devoted service from her beloveds in the last months of her life. 

I have heard others speak of her tendency towards the brutally blunt. It is true she did not dilute her truth very readily, and yet, she was always gentle with me. Perhaps she also understood the fragility that living inside the constellations of our woundedness, the kind that do not heal, can afford us. We shared that root, and offered salve to each other, when those energies rose and entangled our vitality. 

One of the last times I saw Anna, she asked me to brush her hair, which had matted and locked from lying so long, and as I ran the brush through that auburn glow, deep, thick hair, vibrant with health, it seemed such a strange and incomprehensible paradox, to know of the potential imminence of her physical decline, the profundity of her pain and yet to simultaneously behold her vitality and beauty, the warm olive of her skin, the potent vitality of her hair, the thrumming life force of her sleek and potentised body, the purity of her seeking heart, the natural way she inhabited her skin, even in her pain. 

And still a strange liminality lingers, even as her body has passed from this world, yet we are tending our cracked lips with her lemon myrtle balm and administering hawthorn elixir for our broken hearts. All the remedies that were so lovingly crafted by her hand are what we reach for when our bodies have need of healing. She is tending to us yet from her place in the beyond. We have all been left behind, to mourn her loss as she blazes on to her next grand adventure. 

I loved Anna, I still do, I always will. She made my life more alive and connected. I am so honoured that she chose me to be numbered as one of her many friends. I want her legacy to embed itself into my days, I want her to shine out to me from the hedgerow, as berry and fruit and leaf and stem and root. I want her to entangle me, to trip me again and again into this connection to the mystery through relationship with nature, through mushroom, moss and lichen, fur and claw, ferment and compost, tooth and bone. I want to drink deep of her moonshine and get drunk on her love for the wild. Her wild love. 

We are all in our own and varied ways profoundly grieved, but also undoubtedly enriched and blessed and privileged to have been amongst those she knew and loved. I know we will all watch her shining out forever, shining out as nature’s offerings, through her exquisite children, and as we, her star struck kin and kith, share our memories of her around the tender hearthfires of our love.

I offer my deepest prayers of solace and peace to her family, to her children, and her inner circle who she treasured so deeply. The loss is unfathomable, to all of us, who will always miss a world that had Anna shining inside of it.

Words copyright Lucy Pierce 2022

Pottery & Poetry, Simultaneously

Poetry and Pottery, Similtaneously

It’s like that sometimes, move the hands and you move the mind. 

I make a cup of Earth,

She will carry all the mystery or water.

It feels to me that many of us in this ‘modern’ world would do well to learn a craft. There is nothing more humbling than becoming servant to transmutable matter and it is the greatest teacher I know, other than being a parent, of how it is that we may truly learn to care, learn to take care. 

It teaches us unrelentingly that we are not the master, but the humble servant. That the master is and always will be, the life force behind the matter. That with time we may slowly learn the right mix of elemental fusion, to allow the material to be given life between our hands, to show us it’s capacity of form and eloquence of being, but that this will only happen when we lay aside our brute force and learn that anything worth doing is always, utterly, an expression of our love and an utterance of our care. It is a happenstance of mystery and contains our forebearance for the way life will be made and unmade between the  hands of human forever, and what a precious blessing it is, to be made and unmade and made again by the forces that lie beneath and between and within and all around us. 

There is a forging of instinct that happens and a honing of will, our animal intelligence is asked of us. Our capacity to learn the invisible threads that weave a thing into being and hold it in place. The way that all of life makes a thing so. The way it is a relationship. Every thing, a relationship. 

It teaches us that every single gesture matters, every single gesture either makes a thing less tenable or more beautiful, makes the world less secure, or more comforting. That this is how we can come to matter, in our capacity to nurture life into form, spirit into matter. Such a profound and humbling privilege, it undoes us from the inside out, and makes us anew. 

The person who can take a raw material and make a thing of beauty, knows these things in their bones. 

Words and image Copyright Lucy Pierce 2022

The Frontline

I just want to say that the frontline looks different for each and every one of us. In between the gulf of anti and pro, there is a universe of complexity, a plethora of nuance. I want to validate those of us with particular neurological and psychological herstories whose survival response at the moment is to camouflage, or to sink our energies deep into our roots, to still and listen and deflect the gaze of obtuse scrutiny. For some of us it is the wise and possibly the only option. It does not mean we are complacent or complicit, it is just that our work is happening in a different place to the visible and overt. 

It will take many folk, many weavers, many strands and many ways to bring in, to birth forth, a resonantly attuned, intelligently integral and holistically responsive path forward for Earth and the chaotic and catalytic expression of Her human tribe at this time.

We are all inside a collective transmutation and for some of us that has triggered formidable internal pathways that hold us and our behaviours in their grips from previous traumas that we are still constellating within the inner worlds of our psyches, within the cosmologies of our embodied beings. I want to honour those of us wrestling particularly with the freeze and fawn responses because the despair in them is often amplified by the invisibility that also resides there. 

Whatever we are gripped by there is an opportunity to deepen our understanding and broaden our compassion, lend ballast to our roots, bolster our insight into the diversity of our individual and collective ecosystems to find the way to connect and to make safe and to gentle the nervous system and to find kindness for self and other, even as we stand bravely in the ferocities of our own emergences. 

Today I offer gentle blessing to all those who find themselves in the inbetween and the liminal places of the as yet becoming, of the not yet known, of the tenderly emergent, of the uncomfortably newborn immanence of transmutational change.

Text copyright Lucy Pierce 2021

Inside Out

Inside Out

There is a part of me that believes 

that because my body is untameable

it is also shameful.

A part that believes the lies,

that looks with envy in the eyes,

betraying the soft and mountainous 

isness of me.

I am not an itty bitty thing.

I am not strung taut and lean.

I am a big Mumma

making the world.

Like a planet my surface has survived 

meteoric barrage.

I am battle scarred.

There are holes in my soul so big

it takes a harvest to fill them.

Like the ocean’s surface my flesh

ripples with a thousand stories.

I cannot be shrunk to size.

My body flows out like a feast

or a font

or a furnace

of love and holding,

of fear and withholding. 

So far past pretty

I have become an ancient creature

of crevice and moss,

blemish and scar,

my flesh chooses it’s abundance uncontained.

My son says 

you are the most comfortable place, Mumma.

And I know there is more to give than a sleek facade.

My mountains and valleys give life,

they are not wrong.

Because of this dissonance inside,

it’s scorn and scathing,

I am less alive.

I avoid mirror and reflection,

my mind skims quickly 

the quagmires of shame 

that ask me to become less of me

and more pleasing 

to the impossible strangers

who fill my eyes each day,

each glance taking me further away 

from what I am.

From the rugged terrain, 

the untameable universe, 

the myriad wildnesses

of my very own body.

Be still, gaze of my father,

voice of the world 

that says I am wrong and less and flawed 

to be the very shape of me,

the very tone and texture

of me.

There can be a nuanced comfort 

that defies appearance.

A heart inside that pulses 

with a limitless love,

like an ancient tide.

It is enough to be here,

deep feeling of body

spirit made flesh,

a miracle.

Be still, hungry ghost.

I am a big Mumma

making the world,

I am not less,

I am just more. 

This life is a mission 

of mammoth proportions

and I cannot house a traitor in my skin.

With Ariadne’s thread I turn inside 

to hunt the deserted paths,

and track the source of pain,

the harrowing beast of my shame,

her monstrous hatred

of my wild.

My heart was born to love her home

it knows what must be done.

My heart has done this a thousand times,

the redemptive wooing of the broken,

the vast and patient succour 

of a Mumma’s love, 

making the world 

safe,

from the inside out.

Image and text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021

Hinge & Pivot

It feels as though I stand within a hinge or a pivot, the threshold between one imperative and another. I am strung taut, poised between the irreconcilable disparity between the needs of the culture and the needs of my nervous system. 

All my life I have asked what was wrong with me? Why can I not keep up? Why am I so incompetent and lacking in capacity to meet the ask of this world? I am so bone-weary of this question. I have journeyed long enough, deeply enough, to know I am the way I am for many reasons, many of which are the intergenerational repercussions of living inside a brutalising commodification of humankind, of all sentient life, an extractive exploitation of animate resource and desecration of the sacred web of interconnectedness that is our true birthright. It has unfurled amongst our kind with heartless disregard for impact and consequence to the living soul of life. We are reaping the harvest of this now like never before. I cannot pretend this is not so any more.

I feel strung upon a wire, the precarious tension between playing the part of maintaining a viable identity in a world that grows dark by it’s own hand, and honouring the true needs of my soul, the neglected warmth of my own humanity, my innate embeddedness in a larger matrix. There is a bone deep ache to redirect my navigational course, my guiding compass, from outer orientation to inner. To stop asking how can I heal? How can I grow in order to survive and belong? To stop asking what is wrong with me and begin to notice what is actually sensitively responsive and intelligently attuned? To start asking how do I support the needs of the specific nervous system that I have, with all its gift and challenge, it’s capacity and limitation? How do I hold to that, unequivocally? How do I strengthen and nurture and protect my exquisite capacity to feel and know through the body as well as the mind? How do I support my mind-body system to attend to the grief and the rage, the despair and loss that I rightfully feel, so that it does not overwhelm me, so that I can swim those deep and turbulent currents with ballast and resource and kindness? How do I also let in the love and pleasure and joy that is my deepest need, beyond independence and autonomy?  How do I stop asking myself to do what is actually impossible for me to do, when the cost of trying is to exist in perpetual hyperarrousal and dysregulation? I am not an economically viable commodity. I have nothing to sell. I am a feeling, sensing, reciprocating part of the pulsing ecosystem of earth and cosmos. It is this beingness that I seek to become loyal to. 

All my life I have been trained to ask how can I serve others, how can I attend to the expectation of what it is to be a woman in this world, whilst being exciled from my own capacity to inhabit need, desire, authority. It has not worked for me, I am strung so thin I could snap. 

I want to find the courage within to change the questions, to change the imperative, to let go and trust that there is something far more nourishing and sustainable and reciprocal that awaits, beneath the thrashings of a desperate world. This world lives inside of me, desperately driving me forward. It is my struggle to survive in a system that does not love what I love, and I feel it dying. I am dying with it. 

But my nature is there also, underneath, half-sensed, waiting, birthing itself through grinding apertures of stone and starlight. My essence and the gift of my incarnated love, vast and permeable, eternal and true. From this place all that previously made me disposable and ineffective, becomes what makes me perceptive and intelligent. My need to rest and bond and attend and listen becomes adaptive, ecological. My capacity to feel and sense, instead of a too-muchness, becomes my ally and the way I become connected and responsive and receptive to all that I am that lives within and also beyond this animal body and it’s longing and hunger and need. 

I cannot keep walking the road of brutality that the dominator paradigm has laid out for me. It does not fit, and yet I must trust there is time to feel the impulse fully land within, to sniff it out, to track it’s pawprints in the neglected wilderness inside. I know it has more to do with being and less with doing, so I sit here amongst the shadows in the gloaming. I will wait. I know not what it will take to make a different choice, but I am here, alive and listening, dreaming inside, paying attention, with eyes soft focused and seeking to know what it will take to make my animal body safe, safe enough to be this profound love that I know glistens beneath the world as we know it? How can I give the dying world even less of me? How can I drink more deeply from the well that lives inside my own precious temple, soft and deep feeling, sometimes weeping, sometimes trembling with rage, sometimes attending to the fear, tracking pleasure, deepening breath, saying yes to more of me. How can I become safe enough now to know there is nothing wrong with me? I am a human being, shaped by my experience. 

Inside, the transmutation unfurls, like a snake or a song, it flutters like moth’s wings for the ancient moon, it keens and sighs, it is enough, just to breathe. 

As I sit in this place I am remembering that I am also something primordial and ancient, unfathomable. That the minerals of my body are the minerals of the earth recycled through incalculable cycles of decay and formation. That the air I breathe is the breath of giants,  rooted and listening, that I am unfathomably indebted to, that which would ask nothing of me, but my breath in return. May I have the courage to stay listening, to stay soft and embodied, to keep feeling into the unformed becoming, the archaic remembering, the unborn immanence. May I wrestle the invitation nested inside the maelstrom of these days.

Image and text Copyright Lucy Pierce 2021